The Link Letdown: When URL Shorteners Fail

There's been some heated discussion lately about URL shorteners and whether they're useful tools or pure "evil." My initial reaction was that much of the debate was overreaction -- after all, you'd be hard-pressed to send links on Twitter without services like bit.ly to cut down their characters. This week, though, I've seen some new evidence that's made me rethink my position.

The Ecosystem Argument

The argument started with a blog posting by Joshua Schachter, creator of social bookmarking site Delicious. Schachter described URL shorteners as being generally bad for most of the online "ecosystem," claiming they weigh down the Web by adding "another layer of indirection" and allowing for spam-oriented links or worse malware links to be masked. The part of his post that particularly strikes a chord with me now, though, is his stance on the potential problems with reliability.

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

There's been some heated discussion lately about URL shorteners and whether they're useful tools or pure "evil." My initial reaction was that much of the debate was overreaction -- after all, you'd be hard-pressed to send links on Twitter without services like bit.ly to cut down their characters. This week, though, I've seen some new evidence that's made me rethink my position.

The Ecosystem Argument

The argument started with a blog posting by Joshua Schachter, creator of social bookmarking site Delicious. Schachter described URL shorteners as being generally bad for most of the online "ecosystem," claiming they weigh down the Web by adding "another layer of indirection" and allowing for spam-oriented links or worse malware links to be masked. The part of his post that particularly strikes a chord with me now, though, is his stance on the potential problems with reliability.

"A new and potentially unreliable middleman now sits between the link and its destination," Schachter says. "The long-term archivability of the hyperlink now depends on the health of a third party. The shortener may decide a link is a terms of service violation and delete it. If the shortener accidentally erases a database, forgets to renew its domain, or just disappears, the link will break."

Error Alert

Those scenarios may seem hypothetical, but I got a small taste of what could happen -- make that, two small tastes of what could happen -- in the past few days. I've been using tr.im for URL shortening on Twitter, and I've generally been pleased with their service. Tuesday, though, I opened my tr.im control panel only to find a "500 Internal Server Error," and nothing more. Sure enough, every single URL within the tr.im domain returned the same code and failed to redirect to its appropriate target.

The issue didn't seem to last terribly long, and I was willing to write it off as a fluke. Thursday, however, it happened again -- and, from my measurement, the second go-round lasted even longer than the first.

Investigating the Issues

I tried tweeting and e-mailing the folks at tr.im to get a better understanding of what was happening and what was being done to make sure it wouldn't happen again. After all, how can we rely on a URL redirection service when we don't know when it might stop redirecting? It's hard to estimate how many links from past hours, days, and months led people to error pages instead of appropriate destinations even during those limited times. And, to an average end-user, that sort of occurrence reflects poorly on the person who posted the link.

Unfortunately, tr.im didn't get back to me in time for this story. The company did, however, post the following two messages on its Twitter page:

"We have fully recovered from this morning's outage. We are getting a serious uptick in traffic since the release of Nambu"

"We assure you tr.im is reliable! An increase in traffic is no excuse. We are increasing our margin of spare capacity."

The same service suffered a smaller issue on Monday, when its statistics service stopped displaying click totals for some time. I was able to reach the team at tr.im then. They assured me that no data was lost and that the "technical issue had been resolved." They also indicated that tr.im had an uptime of 99.67 percent in the month of March, and that the majority of the downtime was a result of planned maintenance to better handle the growing traffic.

For more PC news, visit PC World. Story copyright PC World Communications, Inc.